I took the above picture at PAXEast and got an itch to rent The Calling last weekend. It starts off with a series of instant message texts across the screen where students are conversing about someone reading a website or watching a video and then disappearing or dying.  Imagine it as Fear Dot Com and Pulse (two really bad horror movies from a couple of years back) having a baby in the form of a Wii game. I played the first two chapters, both very spooky and dark with the occasional ghost popping in to say hello. You use the Wii-mote as a cell phone, so while you are nervously creeping through a house full of creepy dolls (ugh!) or an abandoned school, the phone will ring loudly and scare the pants off you. A child’s voice on the other end tells you they are on the way up to shake you (or something) which is wildly disturbing and certainly gave me the shivers. But the controls were off center and slight hand movement turned into giant screen movement. After about an hour I had to turn it off due to motion sickness alone.  Although it is definitely startling to get jumped by a ghost, if the game gets stuck and the same ghost keeps jumping you, the game play suddenly loses its eerie charm.

Last year I picked up Silent Hill: Homecoming for the 360. I hadn’t played any of the previous games, only watched others play them, so I wasn’t quite a veteran of the series (does watching the movie count?). Apparently, the Silent Hill games have very definitive strategies that I was unaware of, and the combat gets HARD. I loved the setting, a standard abandoned town and mutated creatures with drifts of snow and ash falling innocently around you, but I could only get about 1/5 in before I found myself in an impossible situation. Boss fight, no health packs, half life. Dying meant starting over in the same place, with no health packs and at half life. You can’t retrace your steps, either. The game only moves forward, so the only way for me to progress was to start over.  I was already about 7-8 hours into the game, so I admitted defeat instead. Sadly, I was having a lot of spooky fun prior to this setback and was disappointed, so in addition The Calling, I also acquired Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Wii. In the beginning, the game warns you that it will psychologically profile you to mold the game into ‘your worst nightmare’. Apparently, this means giving you a ‘Yes or No’ quiz that includes such questions as ‘Do you make friends easily?’ and ‘Do you enjoy sexual role play?’ Yikes-rated M for Mature, indeed. The premise is based on a past event-you are the main character speaking to a psychiatrist about getting into a car crash and losing your daughter in, of course, Silent Hill. I like it so far and intend to keep playing, but the ‘psychological tests’ make me giggle. For no explained reason, I colored this:

I like the Japanese survival horror games because they terrorize you psychologically more than physically. Chasing a butterfly in a quiet forest at night may sound peaceful and calm, but trust me, something wicked is certainly following behind. Western horror games tend to focus on monsters, zombies, and blood.  Your basic slasher film. I like the subtlety of the Japanese horror genre much more than the gore-fests the Western climate prefers.

For more writings from Jessica, check out her blog, “It All Started With Chrono Trigger…“